…why bore others needlessly

Monthly Archives: May 2010

Changing the system volume with a lirc enabled remote can be a pain in the arse if you don’t know what to look for. If you do, it’s quite simple: There is a package called ‘pulseaudio-module-lirc’ (PulseAudio’s Wiki for module-lirc) that contains the volume control module for the PulseAudio sound server. Install the package via yum and enable it Here… Read more »

Since Mozilla dropped support on OJI (Open Java Virtual Machine Integration), the classic java plugin file javaplugin-oji.so doen’t work anymore for Firefox versions >3.6. Starting in Firefox 3.6, Mozilla will only support the standard NPAPI and NPRuntime interfaces. However, a ‘Next-Generation Java plugin’ (that’s what Sun calls it) is available in Java version 6 update 10 or newer and supports… Read more »

To update the initrd.img to load additional drivers early in the boot process, normally you would simply run /sbin/mkinitrd and let the script do the work. But what if the initrd.img used during the installation of CentOS lacks an important driver? Maybe you want to netboot CentOS, but the initial ramdisk CentOS provides doesn’t have the right modules for you… Read more »

Sometimes, extracting a whole tar archive can be a waste of time (and temporarily disk space). To extract just a single file, you can use This extracts the file file to /tmp/ Of course, most of the time the relative path to the file is not as simple as in the example above: This creates the file /tmp/path/to/file. To avoid… Read more »

I recently installed myStat to keep track of this blog’s rapidly increasing number of readers. Unfortunately, the plugin break the rss feed. The problem is the plugin’s myStat_footer() function, which does not check if the page is a feed before deciding to insert the myStat footer image into the page code. To fix myStat v2.6, locate line 475 in mystat.php… Read more »

As you probably know, I’m using SyntaxHighlighter Evolved to post syntax-highlighted code. Some people mailed me, that in some of my posted code the underscores are not visible (although copy&paste works). Well, the culprit is the line-height attribute of the SyntaxHighlighter Evolved cascading stylesheet: Simply increasing the line-height from the default 1.1em to 1.21em in wp-content/plugins/syntaxhighlighter/syntaxhighlighter/styles/shCore.css did the trick.

Log4J is the current de facto standard not only in open source development. It claims to be fast and flexible: speed first, flexibility second. But there are some pitfalls when it comes to the crunch. The costs of a log request consists of a method invocation and an integer comparison. This is typically about 1-20ns (depending on your processor) per… Read more »